KAMLA DAS, 25, belongs to a landless family in Salba gram panchayat in Chhattisgarhs Surguja district. Her husband does not earn anything, so she is especially appreciative of the opportunity the NREGA has given her to earn in her own village: Now women can also earn, so the familys earnings increase. The NREGA is very important because women get the same wage as men.
The NREGA has enabled her to stop working for a local landlord, who pays women less than men. She has used her earnings to buy rice to feed her family, books and clothes for her children, and fertilizer (they are sharecroppers), and also to celebrate Holi. However, she has faced some harassment from the mate, who pressures the women to work harder. She is also worried about her four-year-old child, who is alone at home when she goes to work. She would like to bring her child to the worksite but this depends on a child-care facility being made available there.
The participation of women in the NREGA was below the stipulated minimum of 33 per cent in the survey sample, and in many of the survey areas, it was abysmally low. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were at the bottom, with women accounting for only 5 and 13 per cent of the NREGA workforce respectively; the situation was only marginally better in Jharkhand (18 per cent) and Chhatttisgarh (25 per cent). The only States where women were well represented were Madhya Pradesh (44 per cent) and Rajasthan (71 per cent).
What prevents women from joining the NREGA in larger numbers in the other States? We were often told by gram panchayat functionaries that women were not interested in NREGA work. But when the field investigators spoke to women directly, most of them expressed a keen desire to work. The interviews revealed five important barriers to their participation in the NREGA.
First, in many areas there are tenacious social norms against women working outside the home. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, field investigators met women who said they had not been able to register and were told that this programme was not for them.
Women in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, reported that when there were more applicants than could be accommodated at a worksite, they were turned away to make way for men. Some of them also faced verbal sexual harassment they were teased, ridiculed or verbally abused by male labourers and other villagers.
The second big hurdle is the lack of child-care facilities. The Act requires that when there are more than five children under the age of six at a worksite, a female worker should be spared to take care of them. But field investigators did not find child-care facilities anywhere (except at two or three worksites, that too possibly as window dressing). The lack of these facilities can be crippling for women, especially those with breastfeeding babies.
Third, the continued illegal presence of contractors at many worksites affects the availability of work and its benefits for women. In some places, the presence of contractors actively impacted womens participation in NREGA work. At some sites in Madhya Pradesh, contractors offered work only to young, able-bodied men. At worksites where contractors were involved, 35 per cent of women workers said they had faced some harassment, as against only 8 per cent at contractor-free worksites.
Fourth, in some States productivity norms are too exacting because the schedule of rates is yet to be revised in line with NREGA norms. For instance, in Jharkhand the standard task for a days work at the time of the survey was digging 110 cubic feet (in soft soil), which is far too much. Certain types of NREGA work limit the participation of women. This applies, for instance, to the construction of wells on private land; women are not employed after digging reaches a certain depth.
Fifth, delayed payments also come in the way of participation of poor women. Delays in wage payments make things particularly difficult for single women, who cannot afford to wait as they are the sole earners in the family. When the wages do not come on time, they are often forced to return to previous, less-preferred forms of employment.
Womens battle to be full participants in the NREGA goes beyond being able to get their names on job cards and getting work. An important part of the NREGA is participatory planning, where the list of NREGA works is decided. Only a small proportion of women workers in the survey sample had attended a gram sabha, and even fewer had spoken at a gram sabha. Many do not go to gram sabhas because they do not feel welcome or because they believe these meetings are not for women.
Much of this is changing, and participation of women in the NREGA is certainly improving. But there are also new challenges.
One of them is the introduction of wage payments through banks. In most places, only one bank account is opened per job card, and generally the account is opened in the name of a male member of the family. This means women will have to rely on men to withdraw their wages. Ideally, there should be one account per registered NREGA worker or at least joint bank accounts instead of men-only accounts. Even better would be for every individual worker (man or woman) to have his or her own job card, bank account, and entitlement to 100 days of work.
Reetika Khera and Nandini NayakCOMMents
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